In this formulation, the process execution is used as a mediating "event" to link the provenance details to the entity described. The prov:wasGeneratedBy statement effectively signals that provenance information about its subject is linked via its object (where "subject" and "object" are used in the sense defined by RDF).

This may be viewed as a rather cumbersome way to express the original example, but it's not clear how this can be simplified without losing the structure that distinguishes the provenance expression.

Use named graph for provenance

A different approach might be to wrap the provenance statements in a separate graph resource; e.g. (using Notation3 syntax). Starting with a fairly direct representation of the ASN form, and introducing a "hasProvenance" statement:

From an implementation perspective, this approach seems easier, but it presents a conceptual difficulty in that it is not clear what the newly introduced "context" node actually denotes.

Relating simplified forms to the full provenance data model

Not addressed above are mechanisms whereby the simplified forms can be related to the full provenance model. It seems that it should be possible to construct some reasonably simple rules to recognize and map simple provenance expressions, but this has not yet been done.